article #280
by Bill Nugent
Every life tells a story. A very enigmatic story is told by the life and times of Clinton Richard Dawkins (1941- ). Dawkins is perhaps the world’s most prominent promoter of atheistic Darwinian evolution. He is one of the “new atheists” along with Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens.
Dawkins was born in Nairobi Kenya, the son of an agricultural civil servant of the British colonial service. Dawkins moved to England with his parents in 1949 after his father inherited a country estate. Dawkins received what he describes as a “normal Anglican upbringing.” He was educated at an Anglican public school and went on to study zoology at Oxford.
It was during his teen years that exposure to Darwinism caused Dawkins to reject his nominal Anglican faith. Dawkins had previously believed in the necessity of a creator because he saw the amazing complexity of life and he reasoned that such complexity required a designer. After exposure to Darwinism, he embraced macro-evolution and came around to accept a secular worldview.
Dawkins went on to get his doctorate and taught at Oxford and did a two year stint at University of California, Berkeley, in the late sixties during which he participated in protests against the war in Vietnam. Dawkins came to prominence in science in 1976 with the publication of his book: The Selfish Gene. He went on to greater fame among scientists through his lectures, TV appearances and subsequent writings. (Wikipedia)
He made a big splash in atheist apologetics in 1986 with the publication of his book titled: The Blind Watchmaker. This book attempts to refute the argument from design (the teleological argument) for the necessity of a creator. Dawkins postulates that random, undirected collisions of atoms could produce the first living cell and so on in an unguided molecules to man evolution by blind chance. Dawkins presents a very strained hypothesis of how life could randomly form from nonlife. Microbiologists now know that even the simplest single celled life form, such as an E Coli bacteria, is mind bogglingly complex.
Atheists might interject that it’s not blind chance but rather it’s natural selection which is the guiding mechanism. I would point out that natural selection is not a guiding mechanism but is rather a sorting mechanism. This is a crucial distinction. Natural selection only sorts out and eliminates the weaker products of biology. The enigma for the evolutionist is how the products of biology are produced in the first place for natural selection to sort out. In other words, it’s not “survival of the fittest” but how do you account for the “arrival of the fittest”?
Uphill evolutionary change requires the addition of new complex structures to life forms. New complexity requires new information in the form of ordered sequence of molecules. It has been shown by Werner Gitt and other researchers that random processes are insufficient to generate the kind of information necessary to build even a simple cell.
A simple living cell’s nuclear and mitochondrial DNA and other cellular components coordinate more than a trillion chemical reactions per second. This is mind boggling complexity. A cell is more complex than the computer you’re using to read this. Many Ph. D. scientists of the intelligent design persuasion rightly contend that such irreducibly complex cellular machinery and functionality could never happen by blind chance in a trillion years. One may as well argue that the presidential faces on Mount Rushmore were carved by natural forces of erosion.
Dawkins is a prodigious author who has churned out many articles and books to try to convince people that God doesn’t exist. During an interview on The Daily Show in September of 2013 he was asked by Jon Stewart what happens to people after death. Dawkins stated basically that human consciousness relies on the brain and the brain rots after death. In essence he was saying that all of your learning and personal maturity and growth and relationships and love and experience will rot when you die! In other words there is no future for any human. A few years from now, after your normal lifespan, you die and your consciousness ends. It is a futile view of life that all atheists must ultimately claim that they embrace.
Dawkins and all atheists argue that humans are a cosmic accident that emerged from meaningless slime and ultimately end up in death which is also meaningless because consciousness is eradicated. Humans begin in meaninglessness and end in meaninglessness according to the church of Darwin. The human lifespan between birth and death is ultimately meaningless according to atheist existentialist philosophers such as Jean Paul Sartre.
So why do Dawkins and the other atheists go to such extreme efforts to write books and go on lecture tours to change the beliefs of humans whom they regard as hairless apes with no souls, whose brains will rot? I’ll tell you why. It’s because deep down in their hearts, the atheists don’t really believe that humans have no souls. They don’t really believe in their heart of hearts that humans have no future or that consciousness ends at death.
Actions speak louder than words. The very prolific activity of the atheists proves that the atheists don’t believe their own atheism! Dawkins and the other “new” atheists have really tipped their hands. The Bible says in the first chapter of Romans that God has put the knowledge of God within man. The atheists have a knowledge of God deep down within them and though they try to suppress the knowledge of God within them they can’t snuff it out! (See Romans 1:19.) They try to suppress the knowledge of God in order to soothe their tormented consciences but they can’t.
Some Christians debate atheists from the standpoint of presuppositionalism. Presuppositionalism is the claim that Christians and atheists deep down have the same basic core beliefs. These presuppositions or core beliefs include the belief that humans live forever and that humans are accountable to a transcendent moral judge and that humans have ultimate destiny and purpose.
When atheists are confronted with the fact that atheists have a secret belief in the meaningful destiny of man and that atheists implicitly believe there has to be an eternal God who gives eternal meaning to life, the atheists have no real answers. Atheists begin to see the illogic of their prodigious efforts to convince humans that life is meaningless. I’ve heard tapes of Christian apologist Greg Bahnsen defeat an atheist in debate with this approach. It’s great theater and very persuasive.
Dawkins and the other atheists secretly believe that humans have come from a meaningful beginning and that humans live meaningful lives during which their decisions affect their eternity and humans have a meaningful conscious existence after death.
There is a God and we are accountable to Him in the afterlife. God has provided for forgiveness of sins. God sent Jesus, the promised Messiah of Israel. The prophets foretold that Christ would come and suffer and die to take the punishment of our sins upon Himself. Christ rose from the dead to offer forgiveness of sins to all who repent and call upon Him. Jesus Christ came in fulfillment of over 300 predictive prophecies recorded in the Old Testament centuries before His birth. Christ has purchased our forgiveness! Turn to Christ today to receive forgiveness of sins!
Steps to salvation:
Jesus said “Ye must be born again” (John 3:7).
Prayer to receive salvation:
“Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13).
To receive the salvation that Jesus purchased for us at the terrible cost of His suffering and death on our behalf I invite you to pray this simple prayer:
“Dear heavenly Father, I thank you for sending Jesus, the promised Messiah, to die for my sins. I admit that I am a sinner. I repent of my sins and I ask for your forgiveness on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I ask you to fill me with your Holy Spirit to empower me to serve you under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
If you prayed this prayer in the humble sincerity of your heart then you have received everlasting life, which includes power to live right in this life and entrance into heaven in the afterlife!